Build performance best practices
CI is an ongoing process, and therefore, you will have a lot of parallel builds running within your environment at a given time. In such a situation, let's look at how we can optimize them using a number of best practices.
Aim for faster builds
The faster you can complete your build, the quicker you will get feedback and run your next iteration. A slow build slows down your development team. Take steps to ensure that builds are faster. For example, in Docker's case, it makes sense to use smaller base images as it will download the code from the image registry every time it does a build. Using a single base image for most of your builds will also speed up your build time. Using tests will help, but make sure that they aren't long-running. We want to avoid a CI build that runs for hours. Therefore, it would be good to offload long-running tests into another job or use a pipeline. Run activities in parallel if possible.